Deck The Halls With Luxury Tinsel

With the #costoflivingcrisis in full swing, consumers are watching every penny and want to have absolute confidence when they make a purchase.

I am all in favour of a little poetic license in marketing but honesty and integrity are hugely important qualities in building trust so the claims that companies make about their products should be transparent and never misleading.

Let's start with the obvious; "Made In.....".

Where a product is made has implications but nothing more. For years 'Made In Japan' was not considered a badge of quality but today it is a huge positive and a re-assurance behind any item. 'Made In China' has suggestions of cheap production values, especially in the industry that I inhabit, eyewear, but there are high-quality factories as well as poor, just as you would find in Europe. None of that takes into consideration the human rights and environmental issues that are so important to consumers when weighing up their options.

All of this is masked further by inadequate laws governing labelling. If part of an object is made in one country and part of the product in another country, which country should be listed as the origin? Europe offers guidance for how many operations need to be carried out in France, for example, to carry the label #madeinfrance but those operations might only account for a small percentage of the total and might also not have much influence on the actual quality of the end product.

A closer look at some of the language employed suggests more marketing than honesty. Made In France suggests that your product is actually manufactured in France but then so does 'Frame France' or 'Design France'. I suggest that the last two are examples of deliberately misleading language and that even the first is no guarantee of integrity.

While the language used and the rules around it remain [at best] loose, our only option is to educate ourselves as to what represents genuine quality and what we should be paying for. I make no apologies for repeating that #eyewear made in Europe is not necessarily beyond reproach and that a #glasses made in China are not necessarily badly made or poor value. What consumers need is transparency.

While Christmas shopping this weekend, I was confronted with the opportunity to deck my halls with "luxury tinsel". Call me a pedant but I had to ask the sales person what constituted luxury tinsel and of course, they could not answer. I have not yet found time to write to the CEO so, for the moment, the Kirk household is dressed with non-luxury tinsel although I am sure I have heard the neighbours whispering about the state of our Xmas decor.

You don't need to go too far to find abuses of the word 'exclusive' either. I would love to think that 'exclusive' means 'only available here' but oh, no! It seems that exclusive has come to mean, errrrrrrm, 'good', nothing stronger and perhaps only on a par with 'luxury'. Maybe next year @Karenkirk and I should plump for exclusive tinsel.

If I start to complain about the elasticity of the word 'legend' or the capricious 'obsessions' that dominate #instagram it will make me sound like a grumpy, middle-aged man......so I won't. Let's chalk them up to 'parlance of the day'.

Nevertheless, there is an important difference. Whether you are 'excited for' an event or 'excited about' an event would not really cause anyone to be duped or to spend their money unwisely. Describing a jacket as 'weather proof' when really what you mean is that the wearer will be less cold in the cagoule than if they popped down to Tesco's naked, is a little disingenuous and could cause the customer to spend their hard-earned cash unwisely, not to mention the risk of frozen extremities.

I take this opportunity to wish you legends an exclusive Christmas. I'm excited for all the luxury snow that might fall on us which will obvs be 'Made In Lapland'.

Ho, ho, ho........